David Cronenbergs delve into a grimy video game world has lots of plus points, but isnt quite as good as it should be. Stick to Super Mario.

David Cronenbergs delve into a grimy video game world has lots of plus points, but isnt quite as good as it should be. Stick to Super Mario.

Rating:
6/10

Running Time: 97 minutes

US Certificate: R UK Certificate: 15

On DVD

In America, April 1999 was a good month for the perennially disorientated. Within the space of a few weeks, cinemas were hit with The Matrix (in which the lines between reality and virtual reality become blurred), Open Your Eyes (in which the lines between reality and virtual reality become blurred) and this one, eXistenZ (in which, er, the lines between reality and virtual reality become blurred).

Of course, the three films are far from identical. eXistenZ doesnt, for example, have Keanu Reeves doing his best to be taken seriously in a big long leather jacket, and neither does it have Penelope Cruz rabbiting on in Spanish. It does, however, have Jude Law and Jennifer Jason Leigh running around a video game world eating dodgy Chinese food and shooting at people with a gun that uses human teeth instead of bullets (well, you know what they say  tooth hurts. Arf!!).

Its set in an apparently not-too-distant future where the top celebs are the game designers, and anyone whos anyone is able to play along by plugging a wriggling pink blob into a custom-drilled port in their backs (if you ask me, if seems a bit unnecessary giving people a hole in the bottom of their spines when theres a perfectly good port just a little bit further down). Its against this backdrop that dim-witted security guard Ted Pikul (Law) and increasingly-exasperated games guru Allegra Geller (Leigh) fight to stay alive. Ah, but is it all just part of the game, or are they actually killing people for real? Dont ask me  there was never this sort of trouble with Sonic the Hedgehog.

Writer-director David Cronenberg, a man who has long-championed the slightly seedy, presents us with a bizarre world where technology and organic matter merge in ways previously unseen on screen. His weird and wacky ideas give eXistenZ a look that is all its own, but sadly the premise still seems barely enough to carry an entire movie. Once the ideas novelty value has worn off, this is actually a fairly average piece of story-telling, with pretensions of deep-thinking soon taking secondary importance to run-of-the-mill action sequences. Then theres the final twist, which seems to owe more to the fact that twists were fashionable in 1999 (it would also become the year of The Sixth Sense) than any convincing attempt at rounding off the story.

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